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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

Dana Levin was raised in Lancaster, California. She received a BA from Pitzer College in 1987 and an MFA from New York University in 1992.

She is the author of Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), Sky Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2011), Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and In the Surgical Theatre (Copper Canyon Press, 1999), which was selected by Louise Glück to receive the APR/Honickman First Book Prize.

About her debut, In the Surgical Theatre, which also received the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, Glück writes, “Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels.”

In an interview with The Kenyon Review, Levin says, “I’ve come to see that I compose many poems as dramas, enactions. Therefore, pace and volume must be attended to, for essentially I am trying to render the sound of feeling (and/or the pace of thinking).”

Levin has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation, among others. She has previously taught at the University of New Mexico, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and the College of Santa Fe. She currently serves as a distinguished writer in residence at Maryville University. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Gods Are in the Valley

It's the mountain from which the tributaries spring: self, self, self, self—

rivering up on curling plumes from his elaborate head-piece

of smoke.

His head's on fire.

Like a paleolithic shaman working now in the realm of air, he

folds his hands—

No more casting bones for the consulting seeker, this gesture

seems to mean. Your business, his flaming head suggests,

is with your thought-machine.

How it churns and churns.

Lord Should and Not-Enough, Mute the Gigantor, looming dumb

with her stringy hair—

Deadalive Mom-n-Dad (in the sarcophagi of parentheses

you've placed them)—

He's a yogi, your man with a hat of smoke. Serene, chugging out streams

of constructed air...

Mind's an accident of bio-wiring, is one line of thinking.

We're animals that shit out consciousness, is another.

The yogi says: you must understand yourself

as projected vapor. Thus achieve your

superpower.

About this poem:"The poem was sparked by a drawing accompanying an 8th Century Chinese alchemical text, The Secret of the Golden Flower. To me, the drawing makes an argument for the multiplicity of self, the projected self, the vaporous, ever-changing nature of self: self as smoke. Something of continuous interest to me."

by this poet

You put a bag around your head and walked into the river.
You
walked into the river with a bag around your head and you were
never dead
game on the banks of your
mental styx
for the double
audience
of smoke—
—
You pressed a coin into his palm and stepped across the water.
You
stepped

You don't have to break it. Just give it a little
tap.
tap tap. See,
there's the crack. And if you pry it a little
with the flat end of that spoon,
you'll be able to slip yourself through.
—
To the woods where you're walking. Crushed ice above you

related poems

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.
Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this

We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something

No one knew the secret of my flutes,
and I laugh now
because some said
I was enlightened.
But the truth is
I'm only a gardener
who before the War
was a dirt farmer and learned
how to grow the bamboo
in ditches next to the fields,
how to leave things alone
and let the silt build up
until it